Intel Speeds Up Dual-Core Atom for Netbooks.

Intel Corp. on Wednesday formally introduced a new dual-core Atom processor for netbooks. The chip got a clock-speed boost, but at the cost of Hyper-Threading technology that is not activated on the new chip.

Intel dual-core Atom processor N570 operates at 1.66GHz (up from 1.50GHz of the predecessor), sports integrated single-channel DDR3 controller, integrated graphics controller and has 1MB of cache. The chip does not support Hyper-Threading technology and thus can process only two threads of code at once (unlike the predecessor, which sported HT and could process four threads). The novelty has 8.5W thermal design power, which is in line with its predecessor, but higher compared to single-core Atom chips.

Intel Atom dual-core chip

The Atom N570 is Intel's second dual-core Atom chip designed for netbooks. The first dual-core product for this segment was introduced back in mid-2010 and was adopted by a number of netbook makers.

While dual-core design naturally helps the novelty to offer better performance when using several applications at once, those, who hope to get notebook-like performance from dual-core Atom will not see their dreams fulfilled as general performance of such chips is still pretty low and is suitable only for simplistic applications.

Systems based on the dual-core Intel Atom processor N570 are on display this week at CeBIT from ASUS, Lenovo and Samsung, and will begin shipping in March.